inspirations & ideas from the west coast

Hot Dog Relish

I’ve never had a spoonful of relish plain. This is unfortunate because I just made my first batch of relish and, when I come around to tasting it in a week or so, I will have no idea how to tell if it’s good!

I was in Ontario for the last two weeks visiting family and one of the things I did there this past week was make 12 pints of relish with Mom. We had to source the recipe from our old family cookbook because we knew we had a relish recipe, we just couldn’t find it. Mom couldn’t find her copy of the cookbook so my husband sent a photo of the recipe from mine back in Victoria as he was still at home.

We had so many cucumbers! Our original plan was to just make icicle pickles but the half-bushel that Mom ordered turned out to be a heck of a lot of cukes. So we started a crock of pickles and also decided to make relish with the leftovers.

I didn’t take photos as we started so you can’t see what that mound of fresh cucumbers looked like. To the (approximately 24) cucumbers we added 12 onions, 1 jalapeño, 4 red peppers and 7 tablespoons pickling salt and let the mixture sit overnight.

In the morning we drained the mixture and added in the rest of the ingredients:

The ingredients we added in the morning were six cups of sugar, three cups of apple cider vinegar and one tablespoon mustard seeds. We also added in a little green food colouring so that the lovely green colour would stay.

We brought this to a boil and then simmered it for 10 minutes:

And jarred the first batch.

This is what the mixture looked like after we took the first six jars’ worth off for the 15 minute processing:

And here are the first six jars cooling on the counter. Among the 12 final jars we only had one not seal, not bad.

We never tasted the relish the day we made it but I did take some home with me to Victoria so I can try it. If it’s good I might make a batch for myself, but not 12 jars’ worth! One thing I might do for my batch is to increase the heat and add more jalapenos. We’ll see.